SmartWorld Weekly : From open sourcing to barring the signals

This week’s SmartWorld Series features an effort to open source smart home automation solutions, watch that counts down your life, cars that changes color based on the driver’s mood, and fashionable wearable tech.

If you missed this week’s SmartWorld Series, here’s your chance to catch up on the exciting developments happening in the connected world. Each week, we round up the best of apps and services for health and fitness, smart homes, smart cars and anything related to the Internet of Things.

Open source the Smart Home : Cure app fatigue

If you are experiencing app fatigue because of the many apps you manage for your different smart home solutions, the solution for this may soon be coming. SmartHome Monday featured the collaboration between ABB, Bosch, Cisco, and LG to develop an open architecture for data exchange so that these smart home devices can better talk to each other.

When will you die? Tikker takes on the Grim Reaper

Wondering how much time you have left to walk on this earth? Check out Tikker in this week’s Quantified Self roundup. Tikker is a watch that counts down your remaining years, hours, minutes and seconds. It’s not an exact science but some people find it eye opening to know when your time will be up. Living a life full of hatred, fear and loneliness will do no one any good, maybe Tikker can help you see the world in a different angle.

Moody cars : Future autos can change color with your feelings

Remember being fascinated with mood rings? I remember being amazed with the fact that it changes color based on your body temperature. But being a kid, I thought the color really conveyed what you felt. What if cars can do that? Will you be interested in one? This week’s SmartCar roundup featured the Toyota FV2, a concept car which will be featured at the Tokyo Motor Show later this month. Toyota claims that the car will be able to detect the driver’s emotions and the color of the exterior will change accordingly. Will red mean passion or road rage?

Wearable tech for fashion-forward women + paranoid peeps

And if you’re looking for trendy pieces, check out this week’s Wearable Tech roundup. Women will love Mujjo’s new line of gloves meant for females that won’t get in the way of being productive with touchscreen devices. Or if you’re tired of all the buzz your smartphone is throwing at you, you might just want to own an Escape Jacket so you can just drown out all the noise.

Mellisa Tolentino started at SiliconANGLE covering the mobile and social scene. Over the years, her scope expanded to Bitcoin as well as the Internet of Things. SiliconANGLE gave Mellisa her break in writing and it has been an adventure ever since. She’s from the sunny country of Philippines where people always greet you with the warmest smile. If she’s not busy writing, she loves reading, watching TV series and movies, but what she enjoys the most is playing or just chilling on the couch with with her three dogs Ceecee, Ginger, and Rocky.

Premium Research

Wikibon argues strongly against Revolution towards a 3rd platform. The conclusion from this analysis is that applications will evolve; conversion should be avoided like the plague. The greatest opportunity is to continuously adapt today's operational applications by the addition of real-time or near real-time analytics applied directly to the current organizational processes and applications that support these processes. This is likely to translate to the greatest value to most organizations, and where possible avoid the risks of converting systems. The study of organizations that have applied real-time analytics to their current operational systems have shown incredible improvements in lower costs and greater adaptability. Business and IT executives should understand the enormous potential for adding decision automation through real-time analytics to current operational applications in their organizations. New technologies should be judged by their ability to support real-time analytics applied to operational systems, and supporting incremental improvement over time.

In a recent web-based survey conducted by Wikibon, 300 North American enterprises whom had either been utilizing, or considering the adoption of public cloud, answered questions regarding IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) perceptions and usages. These questions varied in topic but were centered around an examination of which workloads were best suited for usage in the public cloud. This research examines a few additional key insights that shed some light on the growing IaaS world.

Today's Technology infrastructure management is largely non-differentiated and wasteful. Technology executives must re-think the strategic role of human capital and begin to implement new ways to consume IT as a service. This post draws on the learnings of senior executive Alan Nance from Royal Philips who is dogmatic in its approach to transforming its infrastructure to a service model.

There have only been two successful volume introductions into the marketplace in the last 50 years - DRAM and NAND flash. There has to be a clear volume case with good economics for 3D XP to be able to gain a foothold in consumer products. Without volume in the consumer space, there is unlikely to be much volume traction in the enterprise space. CIOs, CTOs and enterprise professionals should take a wait and see stance, and monitor the adoption of 3D XP in the consumer and military spaces. If and when there is volume production for 3D XP, enterprise adoption should start about two years later.

The use of open source software continues to accelerate and expand in the marketplace, especially in areas where technology is significantly disrupting established business models. IT organizations should be actively seeking to understand how open communities operate, how different licensing models work, and how they can be more actively engaged with both the vendors and communities that are shaping open source software.

CIOs understand that a clear cloud strategy is critical for IT today. Wikibon believes the biggest mistake organizations can make is converting major applications into the public cloud (including SaaS) without thinking about the implications to their existing business process workflows. Wikibon recommends that IT develop and implement a hybrid cloud strategy using the existing management workflows and compliance processes for both the public and private cloud components in the hybrid cloud.

In 2014, Wikibon defined a new category "Server SAN" that sits at the intersection of software-defined storage, hyperscale methodologies and converged infrastructure. This article is the executive summary of primary research that gives the status of the market, examines the vendor ecosystem, lays forth the revenue and 10 year forecast and gives direction for expansion beyond simple "hyperconverged infrastructure". This information is available for public consumption, the full research is available to Wikibon clients.

In this research paper, Wikibon looks back at the introductory Server SAN research, adjusts the Server SAN definition to include System Drag, and increases the speed of adoption of Server SAN based on very fast adoption from 2012 to 2014. The overall growth of Server SAN is projected to be about a 23% CAGR from 2014 to 2026, with a faster growth from 2014 to 2020 of 38%. The total Server SAN market is projected to grow to over $48 billion by 2026. The traditional enterprise storage market is projected to decline by -16% CAGR, leading to an overall growth in storage spend of 3% CAGR through 2026. Traditional enterprise storage is being squeezed in a vice between a superior, lower cost and more flexible storage model with Enterprise Server SAN, and the migration of IT towards cloud computing and Hyperscale Server SAN deployments. Wikibon strongly recommends that CTOs & CIOs initiate Server SAN pilot projects in 2015, particularly for applications where either low cost or high performance is required.

If containers are at the center of a shift in how applications are developers and delivered, and their pace of growth and change is unprecedented in IT history, this could have a massive ripple effect on both suppliers and consumers of the ecosystem of IT technologies.